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Mike Carey is not as bad at his job as you think he is

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Here are three takeaways from the NFL’s championship round: (1) The Panthers are really good, (2) Von Miller is absolutely terrifying, and (3) CBS officiating “expert” Mike Carey isn’t great at his job.

I wasn’t the only one who came away from the weekend with that last thought. Carey was widely mocked on social media after suggesting Peyton Manning’s backward pass would be ruled an incompletion instead of a fumble, despite replay showing otherwise.

He even inspired a few hot takes with writers calling for him to be taken off TV before, as Sporting News put it, “he tells us the world is flat.”

My opinion of Carey was not very high, honestly — and complaints about him have been leveled all season long — but I wanted to know how accurate he really was in making these calls. So I went through every replay review that took place this season during games broadcasted on CBS, and guess what? Mike Carey is actually very good at predicting the outcome of reviews.

Carey was brought into a broadcast 44 times before the ruling of a replay was announced. Four times he did not give an opinion on what the call should be. Of the 40 times he ventured a guess as to what the ref would decide, he was right 36 times, or 90% of the time.

Of the four times he was wrong, the only play that was really a no-brainer was the fumble call in last Sunday’s AFC Championship game.

Another Carey gaffe that got a lot of attention was his review of a Kam Chancellor interception in Seattle’s Week 12 win over Pittsburgh. The ruling on the field was an interception. Carey thought there was “dual possession” as Chancellor and the Steelers receiver went to the ground and then the ball came loose, which would result in an incompletion. The referee awarded the Seahawks the interception and NFL Twitter had a good laugh, but, based on the replay, you can see where Carey was coming from.

Carey’s biggest flaw as a broadcaster is his inability to articulate his point, and that’s what really drew ridicule for the Seattle call. Here’s how he explained his rationale:

Well, this is one that, really, talk about dual possession. There was no dual possession coming in, but when the receiver hits the ground, and the defender comes in, the ball comes loose. It’s out of bounds. When the ball comes loose, the ball should be incomplete at that spot.

If a big part of his job is to clarify the rules for fans (and it is), then he is clearly lacking in that aspect. He’s just not a polished television speaker, which is problematic if you are getting paid to speak to millions of people every weekend. And it’s not just the complicated rulings that leave Carey talking in circles. Here’s how he explained a simple touchback call in a Browns-Raiders game from earlier this year:

A real close one. And here’s the rule: It’s not does he have control of the ball — is he touching the ball when he’s touching in the end zone. ‘Cause that makes it dead in the end zone — ‘cause the player is touching in the end zone, it makes it dead immediately.

Hmmm…

Carey is a lot better at making calls than we give him credit for, but in television, charisma goes a long way, and Carey has the charisma of CPA — hence the perception that he’s bad at his job. We’d rather see a well-spoken person get 75% of his calls right than someone who can’t put together a coherent sentence getting 90% correct.

Undoubtedly, CBS will go to Carey for a big review during Super Bowl 50. He’ll stumble through his explanation and people will do the lazy, boring, unimaginative and no-longer-even-remotely-amusing thing and put Jordan’s crying head on a picture of Carey and no one will even notice that he got the call right.

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